


Outwith Time

by Transistance



Series: Incompatible [13]
Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Affection, Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Established Relationship, F/M, Memories, Open Relationships, Opposites Attract, Past Violence, Reflection, Requited Love, Sleeping Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 06:46:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5529869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grell considers the scope of their relationship - after all, it has lasted almost forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outwith Time

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry about Grell's subordination complex. Honest I am.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, Merry Christmas.

He is beautiful.

In body, in soul, in voice, in self; he is, if not flawless, at least tangibly gorgeous, in everything he says, in everything he does.

She has loved him for a long, long time. Too long, perhaps, to consider the infatuation as an issue, or any sort of hassle; if anything it has been a comforting consistency, a reassurance that even if everything else about her is to change her love, at least, will remain steady.

She has loved him longer than she has known herself – and that must count for something.

Grell is aware that she is a little lost in her admiration for him - _admiration_ , ha; that's certainly one way of putting it – and has been for almost her eternity, but at this point there's no harm in it. There used to be, and she was aware of that, too; aware that her overwhelming desire to gain his attention in any manner or form was close to self-destructive. 

She wonders, sometimes, if her limerence would have destroyed her. Would she have chased him to her own grave, made one reckless move too many, or concluded that he would never feel for her and given up – on him, on herself, on everything? Grell likes to believe that she would have accepted it and moved on, but she's never quite certain. There is a level of unpredictability deeply ingrained within her, and it's not only other people who notice it.

But then, her attraction toward Will hasn't been unpredictable. It can be charted with ease in her mind's eye, each potent moment and each budding bloom; for an onlooker, it must have been obvious from the beginning.

She hadn't fallen in love with him on first sight. There had been no swooning, no breathtaking moment of connection between them – indeed, when they had been forced together she had hated him as much as she'd hated everyone else; resented his low grades, deplored his polite acceptance that she would be his partner for the most important month of their afterlife. She'd wanted someone who would look down on her, someone who would challenge her and invigorate her and clash head to head every moment they spent together; someone stronger than her. Someone whose acquaintance would end in the deepest throes of passion or the bloodiest desecration of rage that could be born between them.

Someone with decent grades, at _least_.

Being partnered with William had felt like a punishment, and she had been incensed. Not only a B average but a B _straight_ , and living up to those grades through every aspect of appearance and manner as well. She had been certain that the examiners had put her with such a man in an effort to hobble her chances before she'd even begun as a reaper – only later was she informed that it had been an alphabetical register – and made every effort to hate him. Useless, colourless excuse of a man.

Cold, arrogant deity of a man.

She'd tempered toward him as their time had ticked away, as she'd realized that he was impossible to get a rise out of and utterly bland in personality. His only saving grace was that he had been as determined to pass the exam as she had been, and in spite of her concept of him being physically weak and lacking the cruelty she so craved, he didn't antagonize her and they worked.

Grell hadn't even paid attention to his body until he'd used it to hurt her, striking her down and finally proving that _there_ , there was some life behind the dead gaze, there was some passion in his quiet existence. And when she had realized that he was capable of that, she'd fallen headfirst into the sea of limerence that has stuck in her ever since.

It was not that he had hurt her. People did their best to hurt her all the time; her record for having to be dragged out of fights through her trainee years is still unmatched. Grell had been scratched and kicked and generally beaten more times than she could count, even then – no, it was not that he had hurt her.

It was that he had hurt her without malice or disdain; he had not hurt her because he disliked her. He had taken her on out of self defence and beaten her to save their exam, because he didn't care about her; but he had the ambition to do well, and it outweighed his inclination toward being passive. It outweighed her hatred for all things that surrounded her, and showed that, if he wanted to be, he could be better than her.

He couldn't have known that Grell had never deemed another reaper her better; couldn't have known that in putting her down so easily he was fusing himself into her affections so permanently. He couldn't have known that he had set a bar that she has never found any other individual to break.

She had _lusted_ after him in the beginning, and made no attempt to hide it – and after her tumultuous student-hood, that had been a mistake. She'd made more than enough enemies that her blind, aggressive adoration for Will was quickly harked on and decried as another of her dangerous instabilities, which in turn served to form the basis of the reputation that she has half enjoyed and half resented since.

Through a beautiful miracle of organization, she'd found herself with the fortune of being partnered with William more often than not when they had passed their mentoring stage; and somehow, even then, his indifference toward her was not a deterrent. The mockery that stung from all angles never dripped from his lips, not because he didn't hate her – but _oh_ , how that had allowed her to dream – but because he didn't care. Grell wasn't worth his time, because he was better than her. Under this close sharing of their individual lives her love had bloomed, because the more she learned of his hard words and his bright eyes the easier he had been to want. The more he adhered to rules and berated her for not doing so the more she ached to find a crack in him, to give him cause to slip up, because he was so blindingly beautiful and so beautifully superior and to find one flaw - any single aspect of his being that was not poised and perfect - would free her from his dizzying spell.

One flaw and he would have broken her heart, and she would have been able to move on.

When he'd been promoted to a supervisory position she had almost cried. William had claimed the post effortlessly, and that Upper Management could clearly see the same truth that Grell could and had rightened the imbalance of having him working as her equal was indescribably pleasing. The only downside was that it had prevented him from working collections with her (a fact that he made no attempt whatsoever to deny his own satisfaction with), so she'd taken to visiting his flat out of hours.

More often than not he wouldn't let her in. That had been around the time that he'd started wearing his hair slicked back, presumably in an attempt to remove even that last semblance of disorder from his life – Grell's hands always itched to touch it, to fuss his pristine appearance into chaos – and she could see some part of him straining in a very clandestine way to distance himself from who he had been even days before, to appear a more refined version of himself.

She had approved of this, even as Will spat on her own changes, and if she didn't bat her eyelashes and promised to behave he would let her into his home.

Structurally it was a carbon copy of her own flat, too small and dingy, and every time she entered it there was a slight surprise at its state. Not that it was messy, not at all; just the opposite. It simply didn't look as though it were inhabited. She can remember being seated a carefully calculated distance away from him, trying not to fidget under his steady, unapologetically disinterested gaze as she gabbled away about whatever came into her head. Occasionally he would make tea – it was good quality leaves brewed badly, but the taste of even that small attention masked all bitterness in the cup – and more occasionally he would actually give comment, more often than not a back-handed compliment or cruel damning of one of their colleagues, or herself. Often he would adjust his glasses after these, as though reasserting himself.

William moved out of his flat several months after his promotion, without telling her, and any faint ease she had gained at the consistency of his presence vanished.

Grell had panicked.

In hindsight, she's aware that it was stupid to have acted out - but at the time it had felt like the only choice she'd been able to make. Over the years she'd grown inexcusably dependent upon his attention, lukewarm though it was, and the sudden cut off from it had thrown her badly.

He'd only met her eyes when she had done something wrong; only treated her any differently from every one of their colleagues when she had pushed him too far. So she had to push him, obviously; she had to get under his skin and slip up and ruin her status as an efficient worker because if she did that he looked at her, pinned her down in the headlights of that glorious burning gaze, raised his voice beyond that dead monotone he too often embodied, touched her – it was the only time he would touch her. Sometimes only to prise her grip from him, but sometimes – on the better days, or the worse ones, she's not sure – he would lash out at her, finally ionized enough to stop flat-lining. More often than not he would use his scythe, but – and these moments made everything worth it – there were always points at which he would use his hands, even gloved though they were, and although the blows were too quick to savour they had happened. It would have been easy to cover the bruises, either through shifting or simple cosmetic mastery, but she never did. They had to shine out, if they were from him, a warped mark of love to prove that he had touched her.

Had any other single individual stopped to tell her that there had been something wrong with the way she had gone about fighting for his attention – something uneasy about how much she had had to like the little he gave her – perhaps she would have listened. But they never did; not a single shinigami had ever taken the time to point out that there was any injustice at all in the way Grell was handled. Of course, how could they? The majority of them would have enjoyed the opportunity to harm her with as little reservation as Will had, and those who wouldn't have assumed that she had been happy in her own perverse, perverted kind of way. Because pain was pleasure and pleasure was pain and love had to hurt, didn't it? Didn't it?

Of course it did.

He acknowledged her when he was angry with her, when she got too close – but that had never been the only thing that had made it an attractive damning of herself. No, when he shouted - _only_ when he shouted – he showed emotion, and even if it were anger any release had to be better for him than that awful uncaring apathy that pervaded his being, surely? It was her responsibility to make him feel something, and if he wouldn't let her make him feel happy then she'd settle for _satisfied_ , in that particular way that hurting her made people. She was an annoyance, clearly antagonistic, so knocking her down always brought them up.

The _freak_ had sometimes wished that people could be happy without her input, but usually she managed not to think on it. Humans and reapers alike needed someone to hurt, someone to blame – and she knew that she was no exception to that rule – and the height of aggression that William had displayed once or twice after a particularly long day had more than convinced her that he needed to hit _something_.

If that something was her then she was of use to him, even if he never understood that, even if he hated her for it.

This state of affairs had continued for some time, and Grell had almost assumed that it would do so indefinitely. Although she'd wished always that he would just melt enough to let her get closer, let someone in instead of confining himself alone to that rigid mold, it had not been bad. She'd been able to be in his space enough to satisfy her desire to exist alongside him, and rare though it was there was always an occasion or two in which he slipped up and a word that wasn't cruel escaped his lips.

And then, out of the blue, there had been a change. As far as she could tell she'd done nothing to cause it, but it had occurred nonetheless, and for the first time in almost a century he had – admittedly begrudgingly – taken her out for a meal that had nothing to do with work or obligations and let her talk to him without telling her to be quiet and let her touch him without casting her off. But he'd expressed no want to have her, only the opposite, and kept up an uncertain disapproval throughout the evening. Grell hadn't understood what he had wanted at all – perhaps Will hadn't either.

They had danced circles around one another for some time after that, and the kinder he was to her the more confused she became. If he'd fallen for her it had been the strangest kind of falling she'd ever seen – he remained cold, even after he'd decided that he liked her enough to go so far as to kiss her, and for all the forced affection in his actions there was always something aloof and detached behind his eyes. In any other situation she'd have concluded that he was another case of a man who intended to drop her as soon as he had used her body, except that he was dragging things out without her having to put on any brakes and his acute reluctance to put his hands anywhere intimate was fairly obvious from the off.

How had she failed so miserably to understand?

Then there had came that night – that single bright fallacy of a night, in which every unconscious fear that Grell hadn't realized she had been carrying within her had burst into fruition. Because had Will only revealed that he honestly hadn't wanted her in any way at all – that he had kept up pretences for whatever reason, or decided at the last moment that her anatomy wasn't _feminine_ enough for him to merit sleeping with her, or even that it had all been some bizarre out-of-place joke – then she would have been able to understand. It might have hurt her, but ultimately it would have been nothing she hadn't heard before.

When she'd woken beside him the next morning she had found a gaping hole in herself marking where her limerence had fled, burned off in the reciprocation it had finally received. Will had not made love to her because he had been unable to – he had tried. He had wanted to please her, for some reason, for once, and suddenly the void between them had vanished as she had become aware that he was awake, breathing, conscious but quiet; hers utterly, as he had always been destined to be. 

Grell had opened her eyes and met his, so close, and the feeling that buoyed within her had no companionship with the past one hundred years' attraction.

She had pushed the fringe out of his face and found his hands, felt the soft tenderness of his clerical fingers and kissed each knuckle, calloused over from his residual violence. To her terrified delight, he'd reacted favourably; curled down to touch his lips to her crown, let his legs jumble carelessly with her own. Releasing his hands had been the best move she'd ever made, because he pulled her close; thumbed each rung of her ribs, laced them in her hair and guided her face up to his own to kiss her properly.

He must have been aware that doing so would bind her closer against him than anyone else would ever get; must have known that the action provided the ignition of a brand of desire that she had never felt before, because it was entirely, absolutely requited.

Grell has had very little experience in love that doesn't hold within it the bitter-sweet yearning for someone she'll never have, and that he had initiated the touch and was so gently pushing against her as though he wanted her – as though he loved her, as much as she had ever loved him – it was the moment that everything had fallen apart and each glittering shard of what she had felt for him coalesced again into something whose potency she doesn't like to consider.

William had been half asleep, she knew, his usual prickles dulled by the muggy stiffness of having slept not only on a couch but with another person in his space, but his body was warm and she had wanted to stay like that forever.

If it were taken as a snapshot instead of an experience, she knew she could have almost believed that the night before had gone as it had been supposed to. But her body hadn't ached and his composure hadn't broken in any good way and she'd felt no satisfaction, but had felt him smiling – and that had been enough. He had smiled; for her, at her, against her, it didn't matter which. William had expressed contentment at having her close, acknowledging her in her entirety.

That's all that Grell has ever wanted.

Sometimes, now, it almost seems as though they aren't even close; he'll pass her in the corridors and neglect to look at her, and for just a moment she'll wonder if it isn't all a dream after all. But then she wakes up beside him the next morning, his easy warmth and sleepy touch, and she remembers that he wants her beside him with much more attachment that he ever lets show.

It's strange, their relationship. It's not at all what she had expected; not at all what she'd ever dreamed, in any of her most lucid fantasies. It isn't better, but it certainly isn't worse. It is different, like herself, like her love. It's new.

She'd expected many things of Will, none quite baseless and some quite accurate. But what has struck her as the most novel is actually directly related to his apathy, and she still isn't certain how she feels about it. She had thought William would be possessive, perhaps even violently so – she'd thought he would expect a faithfulness from her bordering on the fanatical, and, in certain visions, she could see herself arguing with him for the right to so much as leave the house without him, or having to prove herself in some way to be his and his alone.

Usually, in these isolated views of what could be or could have been, Grell can remember the situation usually being resolved through a vicious outlet of Will's temper through his fists, which she always assumed she would forgive him for without question, because her loyalty to him was absolute and it wasn't his fault that he was so explosive. And then they'd make up, and make love and he'd know that he never had anything to fear.

The reality is entirely different. He has never hit her for any reason pertaining to infidelity; he'd actually been the one to encourage it, and _that_ is what she now finds herself struggling with. She's not sure she can forgive it so easily, in spite of the kind intentions behind it, in spite of the fact that she does act upon it freely. Because the dark corners of her mind are always keen to remind her that _it's not because he wants you to be happy; it's simply because it's easier, and he doesn't care enough to protest._ But he does care about her. She's seen it in his eyes, in the little actions he takes around her. He seems to want her to be happier than he is able to be.

But it still feels like cheating. Couples are supposed to be everything for each other; comfort each other and care for each other, belong to each other. And she does belong to him – she always has, whether he has wanted her to or not.

Couples are supposed to sleep together; make love. Consummation of a relationship is surely its most sacred component; played correctly it can mean so much more than simple pleasure. It is full openness between partners, a physical representation of trust and love and a mutual desire to please – and sometimes, just sometimes, it can feel like the binding of two souls.

And it's something that he won't do.

Or can't do.

It doesn't matter which.

She is not dependent on sex. Grell has convinced herself of that; she may enjoy it immensely, and will have it whenever and wherever she feels like, but it's no necessity. That she is not getting shagged on the nights she's with Will is not the problem. No, the problem runs much more deeply than that. It lies in her desire – her _compulsion_ \- to please him.

If he were to be happy, everything in the world would stand at perfect completion. And this is the paradox, because Grell _knows_ what makes men happy – and whilst everyone's different and it varies from requiring only her tongue to everything she physically possesses and then some, there is a common trend in what men want from her and what pleases them. It is a certainty; an almost statutory fact. Men enjoy her body – Grell is good at what she does. There'd be no point in doing it if she wasn't. And Will is a man. But Will, quite explicitly, does not want her body.

It doesn't make sense.

She gets that he's asexual. Really, she gets it! Will is less attracted to her than she is to his pigeons, and that's fine. Lots of people aren't attracted to her.

Often they sleep with her anyway, though, because there's always a moment in a night past which external attraction matters not one jot. Maybe William doesn't have this inherent line – maybe he must have attraction to ground any vestige of lust, and in its lack feels no sense of sexuality at all. Maybe his non-existent libido is the cause of his inability to feel attraction. It could be anything, really; she doesn't know how to ask him about it.

It worries her, far too much. Will seems a disconsolate being, even now, and although the apathy may be lightening a little she doesn't believe he will ever be able to banish it entirely. It clings to him in a cloud; once so appealing, she can now only desperately wish it away. He's not happy – Grell is failing to make him happy.

She tries. God, she tries! Chipping away at him in constant search of that rare smile, or even a drop in the tension in his shoulders, a relaxation in his face. It doesn't seem to bother him – but that's the problem. Nothing seems to bother him, and now that she cannot in good conscience annoy him she can only try to cheer him up.

Some days it seems to work, and there's an ease about him that lifts her spirits immensely. He doesn't seem as distant or as highly strung as he once did, and that awakens something almost akin to guilt within her – did the way she'd acted toward him cause him so much stress? Surely not. Surely he'd have made a greater effort to stop her if she had been.

These days, she has tried to cut out the body of the arsenal of annoyances she has used in the past to piss him off. Paperwork, though tiring, is more often complete by its deadline than it ever has been before, and she's stopped lauding over attractive demons to his face. Sometimes innuendoes are actually caught before they grace the space around him. She has stopped touching him when he doesn't want her to – although that's redundant anyway, given the proximity they share – and, perhaps in return, he's giving her everything he can.

This is all well and good, but winding him up is so much _fun_. Grell has found a niche in which she can tease him in a way that she enjoys and that he doesn't seem to find offence in – even though she feels in some vague way that he should – and it provides a wealth of secondary benefits, too.

Sometimes it involves lingerie and sometimes it doesn't.

It stems from his tendency to bed late, of course. Given time alone in a bedroom with nothing to prepare for but sleep makes Grell _bored_ , so it should have been no surprise to either of them that one night found her in a mood larkish enough that it drove her to shed her nightwear and ruck up the sheets around her in a restless desire to shock her partner. She spent longer than she should have positioning her head so that her hair flared, each lock distinct, and her body to its most alluring contortion half-covered by the duvet. Then she had rubbed and scratched at her face and chest until both were scarlet (and more painful than it was worth), let her face slip into easily faked bliss and waited.

She'd been beginning to fidget by the time the room's door had clicked open, and Grell saw Will before he'd seen her.

“ _Touch_ me,” she'd breathed, and the startled offence on Will's face had been almost welcome. He'd frowned at her, shaken his head and murmured _Honestly_ in return before going about his nightly routines exactly as he always did, donned his unattractive pyjama-suit-monstrosity as he always did, and pulled her close to kiss her as he always did, with complete disregard for her nudity.

She hadn't been prepared for how gorgeous it felt, and had almost forgotten who she was in bed with. Nothing had happened that was not concurrent with every other night – but every touch had seemed electric, and she had answered back with an unwise amount of passion that had pressed up against every unspoken rule that has ever held between them. Will had said nothing, but his discomfort – even subtle and unwanted as it was – had given her cause to break, too breathless to do more than mouth an apology, lost somewhere around his neck.

Since then it has become a habit for warm nights, after days mellow enough that she can be certain that he won't think badly of her for it. She needs the crawl of his fingers on her bare flesh, whether intimate or not; needs the assurance that it isn't her body that arouses such repulsion in him. On his worse nights – she can only assume that they're the worse ones, on which the apathy has eaten all ability to push her away – he gives no resistance to being undressed, but watches her with a strange mixture of dead disinterest and morbid curiosity. Will has said before, more than once, that he doesn't understand her need to touch him – but tends to reciprocate anyway, for one or both of their sakes. When there's nothing between them and they lie together, skin to skin, close as anything and terribly aware that their respective base wants are not mutual at all – well, it's almost as it should be.

There's such a tragic irony about it all.

If she had wormed her way into his affections when they were younger, would it have been like this? Her tangled maze of feelings for him would not have yet developed, and perhaps his apathy would not have quite set. If his sexuality is as ingrained as hers then she would have left him, no question of – but now his body is no longer the final prize, and the contents of his empty heart spill over and reach out to her, too familiar in their blind yearning for someone who understands to be ignored.

He is no longer the man she fell in love with – but she is no longer the boy who fell in love with him. They have matured timelessly, intertwined at every point in spite of his desire to pull away and hers to get too close; fire and ice, blood and water, chaos and a straight-jacket pulled too tight – they should not work. Grell knows that. He's sexless and she's too physical; he cannot feel and she drowns in emotion. He's a monochrome mirror, an empty glass case, and she's a messy explosion of gilt-edged entrails and bleeding roses.

They're incompatible. It should be as simple as that – there should be no leeway, no margins in which they can exist together.

But when he's with her, Grell feels whole.


End file.
